Public School of Art and a School of Public Art

The mix of voices led me to a parallel inner dialogue: reflections on the project, the community, the place of education within the museum, the fear of being shot, the role of the artwork, role of the alleyways, art in the alleyways, Avenida Brazil, the young people’s expectations, and mine.

Gabi Gusmão, artist/educator Núcleo Experimental¹⁸⁴

In 1970 Morais published his vision for a Museum of Postmodern Art as a “Pilot Plan of the Future Ludic City” that would have as its central focus the creative act and not the work of art in itself. Vital to this new museum would be an active presence in the city that would not only propose creative actions but also modify the very nature of the museum function:

[…] Guided tours of collections and exhibitions […] could be transformed into expeditions into the city […] integrati[ng] within the very incessant flow of everyday life. Classes and conferences could be equally brought to the street as well as all other ‘complementary activities.’ In the process of the renovation of museology, there is an inversion of values: exhibition and conservation give way to complementary activities that become the primary and basic activities. ¹⁸⁵

While this vision may seem quaint seen against the comeback roar of what Terry Smith has called spectacle art and architecture, whose every flesh and bone celebrates signature architect buildings, highbrow collections, art stars and objects, the shinier the better, Morais’ manifesto still resonates a radical conductive energy.¹⁸⁶ In tune with this spirit, Irradiations was a series of experimental projects with diverse groups and contexts in the city. These experiences aimed to inaugurate a kind of ground zero between educator/learner/artist/public. Nucleus coordinator Luiz

184 Gabriela Gusmão, “Contagious Empathy: Freedom is Painting the Wall of Life,” Revista MESA, no.4: Past as Blueprint: Hybrid Practices and Limit Zones (May 2015) http://institutomesa.org/RevistaMesa_4/portfolio/arte-mam-02/?lang=en

185 [Author translation, Portuguese original: “As visitas guiadas as exposições e acervo, por exemplo, poderão ser transformadas em expedições na cidade, buscando-se com isso uma integração como o próprio fluir incessante da vida diaria. As aulas e conferencias poderão ser levadas igualmente a rua bem como todo as demais “atividades

complementares.” No processo de renovaçãp da museologia, há uma inversão de valores: expor e conservar cedem lugar às atividades complementaries que passam a ser atividades primeiras e básicas.”] The title “plano piloto” recalls the famous title for Brasilia given by the architect Lucio Costa. It is an impressive manifesto for a new kind of art museum. Originally given as a talk at the IV Colloquium of Brazilian art museums in 1969 Morais published it as an article in Correio da Manhã with an introduction that lists the various symposia occurring at the time exploring the relationship of art and public and the need to rethink museological theory considering the evolution of art of the time.

Frederico Morais, “Plano piloto da futura cidade ludica,” Correio da Manha, June 6^th, 1970 (Also in Frederico Morais, Artes plasticas: A crise da hora atual (Rio de Janero: Paze e Terra, 1975) 60-62).

186 Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Guilherme Vergara suggested that this process was a two-way street of existential learning – artists and publics – calling the initiative a “Public School of Art and a School of Public Art.”¹⁸⁷

Over the course of the three years of the Nucleus existence, five artists were involved:

Anita Sobar, Bianca Bernardo, Gabriela Guzmão, Ao Leo (Leo Campos), and Virgínia Mota.

Each developed projects with particular communities including NGOs, neighborhood associations, collectives, and other various organizations, experimenting with different forms and modes of approach. In addition, the educator Inês Guimarães together with Virgínia Mota also developed a distinctive collaboration opening up new experimental in-between territories of art, education and social justice via a partnership with the Penalty and Alternative Measures Court of Niterói (CPMA – central de penas e medidas alternativas).¹⁸⁸ Each project embraced a striving towards mutuality, discovery and literacy of the artist/educators’ and participants’ worlds. Bianca Bernardo worked with schizophrenic patients from Papel Pinel, a therapeutic workshop that is part of the psychiatric hospital Instituto Municipal Philippe Pinel, deploying the possibilities of

“situ-ações” (situ-actions) that fostered a kind of commarderie of listening, a relational mobilization of collaborations that strove to “establish moviments of mutual belonging.”¹⁸⁹ Attuned to the critical dangers of this kind of work being tokenistic, the focus was to intervene in social contexts to contradict messages of exclusion at a personal, (and where possible) societal and institutional level. Here, for example, hope, affection and invention were mobilized as operative artistic-pedagogic practices. In her street poster project Procure-se uma utopia (Find yourself a utopia) Anita Sobar facilitated discussions about hope and utopia with youth from the NGO art and technology school Specatulu and the skateboarding collective Briza. Freire often linked his sense of hope and utopia with an ethico-political choice of consciously intervening in the world.”¹⁹⁰ Andrade had also stressed: “behind every utopia there is not only a dream, there is also a protest.”¹⁹¹ It was connecting with groups that had come together over some kind of social protest and revindication that interested Sobar.¹⁹² Collectively they wheatpasted the words “find yourself a utopia” together with odd image juxtapositions in various places in the city aimed at provoking discussion amongst the group and passer-bys.

187 Luiz Guilherme Vergara, “Escola pública da arte x escola de arte pública – irradiações e acolhimento,” Concinnitas.

188 For more information (Portuguese only) see blog https://nucleoexperimental.wordpress.com/irradiacao/

189 Bianca Bernardo, “Reconfigurando o papel do artista na sociedade e relações,” Report on Study Group of the conference Reconfiguring the Public: Art, Pedagogy, Participation, November 2011 at MAM Rio, Seminar publication 2012 (currently unavailable)

190 Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of Freedom. Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, MD: Rowman &

Littlefield, 1998) 122.

191 Oswald de Andrade, Obras completas, vol 6 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasilera/MEC, 1972) 194.

192 Interview with the artist, June 2013.

Virgínia Mota’s affective video O que significa cuidar de um lugar? (What does it mean to care for a place?) featured interviews with residents from the 1940s social housing project Pedregulho (also designed by MAM’s architect Reidy) and workers affiliated with a company restoring the building. Years of disrepair and negligence meant that residents had absorbed societal devaluing of the housing project and questioned any “clean-up” or renovation efforts.

Workers in turn complained that garbage was simply left or thrown out of windows. Mota’s video captured divergent perspectives and hopes for a new future.

Drawing on her work Rua dos inventos (Street of Inventions) Gabriela Gusmão initiated a collaboration with youth from the NGO Luta Pela Paz (Fight for Peace) based in the Maré favela.

Conversations and observations about everyday street life resulted in an exploration of the concept of freedom. After intense exchanges, an idea emerged “Liberdade é pintar o mura da vida.” (Freedom is to paint the wall of life.)¹⁹³ Descending on a prime community site with paint in hand they promptly painted the sentence on a wall next to the football field.

For each project the affective relationship initiated through a Freirean understanding of

“reading the world before the word,” that is responsively engaging with groups in their locales, collectively identifying issues, (re)valorizing their surroundings through observation exercises, critical discussion and affective trust, became a vital method.¹⁹⁴ Whether talking about utopia while wheatpasting posters in undergound highways, discussing garbage and what it means to care for a place, or making lists about favela street markets – once established, each projects’

affective dynamic was breezily transferred to the museum, architecture and artworks. Gusmão’s description of a two-way communication could be applied to all of the Irradiações projects:

What excited me most in this contact was that we managed to positively walk through the [favela] fair with the attention of someone who walks in an art space, attentively observing the elements present in the environment, talking about color, analyzing the structures of the tents, valuing the space, criticizing or praising the forms of objects. Later, we walked through the museum with the naturalness of one who walks at the fair where works of art are shown and reveal themselves unceremoniously, allowing spontaneous speech and a keen perception of the relationship between concepts and images. It was a spontaneous dialectical exercise.¹⁹⁵

193 Gabriela Gusmão Project with NGO Luta Pela Paz for Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. Email communication, November 14, 2010.

194 Reading the world before the word was a common refrain in many of Freire’s writings where he stressed a process of literacy combining an understanding of text and context. See following publications available in English: the entry on “reading” in Paulo Freire Encyclopedia, eds., Danilo R. Streck, Euclides Redin and Jaime José Zitkoski (New York/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012); Paulo Freire, “The Importance of the Act of Reading,” Journal of Education, v.165, n1 (Winter 1983): 5-11 and “Reading the World and Reading the Word: An Interview with Paulo Freire,” Language Arts, vol 62, n1 (January 1985): 15-21.

195Gabriela Gusmão, “Contagious Empathy: Freedom is Painting the Wall of Life,” Revista MESA.

Here, a way of seeing, observing a street fair, once fostered is brought to the museum where everything from works of art to elevators become part of the environment to be observed and explored. In each project, the ease with which favela youth, construction worker or skateboarder questioned and shared their perspective was grounded in an affective relationship that smoothed the way for such an openness to take place. As Freire suggested, true solidarity is found “[…] in its existentiality in its praxis.”¹⁹⁶ Indeed, the Irradiations resonated with core tenets associated with critical pedagogy: “Participatory, situated, critical, dialogic, multicultural, research-oriented, activist, affective.”¹⁹⁷ They were also grounded in collective practices that mobilize art’s ability, as Esche has noted, “as [a] synthesizing agent crossing and combining fields of mutually ignorant fields of specialization.”¹⁹⁸ Similar to Lygia Clark’s formulation of her participatory practices as a

“lung,” initiatives such as Irradiations enable the museum to anchor the possibility of an encounter that can only be realized in a mutual affective relation of dislocation.¹⁹⁹

This is a scale of working that is micro, organic and 1:1. It is anti-event, the inside/out of Domingos and from an accountability perspective, highly vulnerable and questionable. Yet, by deploying the authenticity of the art process to the educational encounter and vice versa, this 1:1 relation can realize a strategy that may seem counter-intuitive – that individuals are larger than groups, where the emphasis is on each person’s many regimes of belonging e.g. a woman, carioca, photographer, mother, etc., and as such, if deeply impacted may ultimately have a wider reach.²⁰⁰ As historian David Thelen suggests:

By placing individuals at the center as both actors in and observers of history, we can build a historical culture around participation. Individuals, after all,

experience, interpret, revisit, reinterpret – in short, they remember and forget.

Nations, cultures, and institutions can’t, even though politicians and pundits pretend they can.²⁰¹

196 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th editon, Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York/London:

Continuum, 2007 (first published 1970)) 50

197 Ira Shor, “Education is Politics: Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy” in Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, eds. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard (London/New York: Routledge, 1993) 25-35, 33-34

198 Charles Esche, “Include Me Out: Helping Artists to Undo the Art World,” in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Cambridge Massachusetts/London England: MIT Press, 2009) 101-112.

199 Lygia Clark, Do Ato (The Act) 1965, Livro Obra, 1983. “What really touches me in the sculpture “Inside and outside” is the fact that it change[s] the knowledge I have of myself, of my own body. It change[s] me, I have no form, shape or defined features. Its lungs are the same as mine. It is the introjections of the cosmos and at the same time it is my own being crystallized in an object in spa[c]e. […] Completeness. I am overwhelmed by senses. Each time I breathe [I become] aware of my ‘cosmic lung.’ I enter the total rhythm of the action. I became aware of my cosmic lung. I enter in the total rhythm of the world. The world is my lung.” For the complete text see:

http://www.lygiaclark.org.br/arquivo_detING.asp?idarquivo=18 [OBS: The translation is from The World of Lygia Clark web site, however mistakes in the translations and misspellings have been corrected and placed in parenthesis]

200 Norbert Elias saw individuals as being larger than groups in The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, eds. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 199.

201 Ibid.

Like the “acupressure points” of the country-wide micro cultural center initiative Pontos de Cultura (Points of Culture), the idea was to create a network of micro actions. However, Irradiations, never got into a stride, as resources diminished, faith faltered. But the program sketched a possibility of imagining a figure of scale that operates on a molecular level, what Maria Lind has called “dandelion art”, an irradiating network of relational impact, multiple voices, and distributed sensibilities in constant dialogue with the museum.²⁰²